Video premiere: Outer Limit Lotus “Everything Ends Too Soon”

A European goth rock band writing about death can easily become trite and tedious. The truth is, it’s just not that easy to write a good, original song about death. There are so many poems, plays, stories about the end of all things that you have to admit, there isn’t much left to be said that hasn’t already been said better by someone else. When I first read about a Scandinavian post-punk band with a “new, original sound” who was slated to become the next “cult classic,” I couldn’t help but scoff a little. How many times have we heard that before?

But it’s true. The Norweigan death rock band Outer Limit Lotus, is something entirely new.

The video for “Everything Ends Too Soon”, the first single off their new full-length album Lotus Eaters, out October 26th, is undoubtedly beautiful. The endless span of sepia-toned sea depicted in the video is appropriately lonely without trying to hard to evoke the feeling. You really don’t have to put in that much effort to make a video about death sad. The feeling is built in.

But it’s the song itself that really gets you. Outer Limit Lotus has been compared to Tuxedo Moon and there are shades of Pearl Jam and a little bit of Joy Division in there too but truthfully, Outer Limit Lotus doesn’t sound like anyone. It’s haunting and ghostly, as the band sings about lost memories and opportunities, futures that will never happen. And it’s true, you lose everything in death. That’s the point of it. It’s heavy stuff and the fact that these themes don’t make the track any less enjoyable is unbelievable in itself.

Outer Limit Lotus probably will be a cult classic, but this video proves that they should be more than that. They are on their way to becoming classic. Period.